I am using Jenkins to automate my deployment process and it works great!
Currently I am facing issue to company with company policy that all H/W and S/W in company should use latest LTS version which still having support.
Challenge is LTS lifecycle of Jenkins is too short (3 months) for me to do impact check before upgrade in production.
My question is, is anyone here has best practice experience how often we should upgrade our Jenkins version? (and any idea related to this topic.
I update usually every 3 months, but I also do out of the box updates to address security issues as we had it now or a bugfix was provided in a LTS patch that I was waiting for.
The longer you wait the more effort you have in validating changes. Better to have 4 times a year a little bit of effort than having one or 2 times a year bigger effort.
A big help is if you have a test instance where you can test before applying it to your productive instance.
And having everything as code in one way or the other, e.g. I have my repo that creates a docker image with jenkins core and all plugins, so to update I just need to change 2 files, run the automation and I have a new image that I can use on my test instance.
Yes I have Jenkins testing server and we will do impact check on Jenkins testing server before upgrade version for Jenkins production.
But the impact check often took at least 2 weeks consider the Jenkins deployment task complexity, we have to make sure all function running, that is why upgrade every 3 months quite burdening the effort.
Anyway, thank you for your advice.